The current Make Something Unreal contest is approaching its Grand Final, but in a way it’s more interesting to take a look at the winners of the penultimate round of Unreal 3 mod face-offs, Phase 4. It’s a collection of truly excellent mods, demonstrating both the power and versatility of the latest Unreal engine, and how much better still it looks when someone with more imagination/willingness to risk-take than creators Epic take a crack at making something with it. While obviously established names such as The Ball and Airborn are in there, there’s so much in the list that I’ve not previously heard of and am now itching to aim my graphics card at….

I will eat my theoretical hat (in reality, I will probably eat a pie or some kind of flan) if Angels Fall First doesn’t win this MSU contest. It’s a spectacular piece of work. Everything from capital-ship level space combat to planetside groundpounding.

Edit: Also, there’s no RTS elements at play there – those big space battles are all action style, and each position on each ship (pilot, gunners, etc) are manned by either human players or bots.

Damn, all of these had passed completely under my radar, since the actual UT3 game was so mediocre.
I bought the Unreal pack from Steam a while back, and UT1 (nostalgia helping), and UT2004 are far superior games.

Some truly spectacular stuff in there!

Come to think of it, I wish VALVe made some more obvious moves like this to support the mod community, since they speak of themselves like the messiah of modmakers, but in the end, they don’t really make any moves in that sense.
Obviously, they support them implicitly, and give a pat on the head to most good mods, but nothing really visible and great.

That problem (I’d imagine largely due to UT3 never having really taken off, thus giving mods a real table-scraps playerbase) should be rectified when the game goes freeware-standalone. Hurrah for UDK, eh?

Thanks for the mention again. As stated the last time this was mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun, Hazard is still in development. The final commercial standalone release will be substantially different to the mod, so just a heads up that if you play the mod and find things a bit too frustrating / obscure / abstract, rest assured this is ALL being fixed for the final commercial version (without selling out as well!)

I have a clear slate this year with regards to anything else getting in the way of making this game as awesome as it should be. It’s all being devoted to Hazard as full time work, rather than as a spare time project.

For the people that want some AFF but don’t like shooters, there’s both Nexus and Homeworld 2 versions of AFF already out – as well as an AFF-universe space-racing game that’s standalone and an AFF MMORTS currently in beta.